How Jai Courtney Really Feels About The Terminator Franchise Stalling After One Movie

Jai Courtney

Last summer, Jai Courtney became the third actor to play Kyle Reese in the Terminator movie series, following Michael Biehn and Anton Yelchin. Unfortunately, his movie, Terminator Genisys, failed to impress many moviegoers, and although it earned $440 million worldwide, the overwhelming negative reviews led to future plans for the franchise being put on hold. Now Courtney has expressed how excited the was to see what the sequels would have offered.

While plugging his latest movie, Suicide Squad, Jai Courtney talked with our own Sean O'Connell about how despite moving on from the Terminator franchise, he was looking forward to what was being planned. As he put it:

There's definitely some pretty clear outlines for where that was going to be taken, and shit sounded really cool, man. So, that's why part of me is fine with the fact that if we've moved on from that, we've moved on from that. I'm not one to kind of... I don't have many regrets in life, and I don't really hang onto the past too strongly either way. So, it's like fuck, man. It was disappointing to hear that they'd sort of nixed the plans to get another one up and running, because I thought it would probably be relatively quick turnaround if they did it. But, you know, there's also reasons for that, so we'll see.

After Terminator Salvation didn't take off as expected in 2009, Terminator Genisys rebooted the franchise (in a similar vein as 2009's Star Trek) and was intended to kick off a new series of movies. Unfortunately, it failed to take off with U.S. audiences, though it managed to make quite a bit of money from screenings in China. Following Terminator Genisys' overall negative performance, Paramount took Terminator 6 off their schedule at the beginning of 2016, but the studio has yet to officially confirm that the movie has been scrapped.

Despite the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, saying that a new movie is still on the way, that seems less likely with each passing month. Emilia Clarke said in April that she won't reprise Sarah Connor, and Jai Courtney's comments suggest that despite being eager for what was ahead, he's made peace with things not going as expected. Perhaps the only way Terminator will ever be brought back to the big screen is if they reboot the series yet again and bring in a new cast. Maybe this is one franchise that's better off never being revived, or at minimum, wait a decade or more before tackling it again. Hey, at least the first two movies will always be classics.

While the chances of seeing Jai Courtney reprise Kyle Reese are slim at this point, you can see the actor playing Digger Harkness, a.k.a. Boomerang, when Suicide Squad arrives in theaters August 5.

Adam Holmes
Senior Content Producer

Connoisseur of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, John Wick, MonsterVerse and Doctor Who lore, Adam is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend. He started working for the site back in late 2014 writing exclusively comic book movie and TV-related articles, and along with branching out into other genres, he also made the jump to editing. Along with his writing and editing duties, as well as interviewing creative talent from time to time, he also oversees the assignment of movie-related features. He graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in Journalism, and he’s been sourced numerous times on Wikipedia. He's aware he looks like Harry Potter and Clark Kent.